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Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Frankly, My Biggest Objection is the Religious Imagry

(Originally posted by Pat in 1/2012)

A review of The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker

Once
in awhile, a book gets written that is truly a great book—not in the
sense that it is an enjoyable read, or an example of good style, but
truly great in the sense that it will join the annals of
history as the sort of book that changed the future of human society. A
few rare books—Philosophkae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, The Wealth of Nations, On the Origin of Species—manage to achieve the status of turning points in human civilization.The Better Angels of Our Nature documents
these turning points, and in doing so, I think it will be remembered as
one itself. Alone in the social sciences it stands as a landmark opus,
the first time I think we've ever seen a comprehensive,
empirically-validated theory of human social organization. A hundred
years from now, people will look back and say, “It was in 2011 that
people finally began to realize how much better the world has gotten,
and with renewed hope made the final push into world peace and
prosperity.”
For nothing could be more astounding than just how much better the world has gotten. Did
people really used to burn cats alive for entertainment? Was public
hanging really considered a family affair? Were children really
sacrificed on altars to the gods? Pinker documents the answer: Yes—and it wasn't all that long ago.
I'm
sure that much of what we do today—capital punishment, factory farming,
aerial bombardment, sweatshop labor—will draw similar appalled
disbelief from future generations. But this is not reason to despair; it
is reason to celebrate, for our grandchildren will be morally better than we are, just as we are morally better than our grandparents.
There
is a current in intellectual circles today, whether it calls itself
anarchism, primitivism, relativism, or whatever, that is absolutely
convinced modernity was a mistake. Technology has only brought us more
powerful ways to kill each other, they will say; by dismantling
religious values secular rationalism has left us empty, devoid of
meaning. (Professor Hoffmann, if you remember him, is certainly of this
flavor.) Sometimes they will say that modernity has made us morally
worse—pointing to the Holocaust, or 9/11, or the Columbine shootings, as
an example of what modern life is like. Other times they will
contradict themselves by saying that morality is just a matter of
opinion, there is no “better” or “worse” and all is vanity.
These
people are wrong. Objectively, demonstrably wrong. They are
Creationists, and Pinker is our Darwin. The world is better than it used
to be—morally better—and it is secular humanism that has made it so.
Infanticide
is no longer routine. Rape is no longer considered a normal, acceptable
spoil of war. Torturing animals we recognize as a symptom of
psychopathy; it used to be called “good clean fun”. We have a word now,
“genocide”, which makes us recoil in horror; it is a word we coined
recently for what used to be military standard operating procedure.
Even
the atom bomb, which still haunts the world's nightmares, has not
actually killed very many people. Far more died in any given carpet
bombing, or in any few years of Mongol raids, than have yet been killed
by nuclear weapons. We did not need these awful weapons to murder each
other en masse, and now that we have them—just in time, perhaps—human beings have figured out how not to murder each other nearly so often as they used to.
Perhaps
we needed a few egregious outliers like World War II to show us the
error of our ways. But Pinker is skeptical of this idea, and so am I. We
had already seen plenty of violence before—more spread out, perhaps,
conducted in smaller portions at a time—and indeed we had already seen
violence that killed a far larger proportion of the human
population than the World Wars could lay claim to. If absolute numbers
are all you care about, we may as well all die now; that way there will
not be any humans to be murdered.
In truth, I think the technology
that saved humanity was not the atom bomb, not the machine gun, not
mustard gas or high explosive. Improving the destructive power of
weapons has no track record in making the world safer. Rather, it was
far humbler inventions, like the telegraph, the radio, the television;
the airplane, the cargo container. It was not the capacity to destroy,
but the capacity to communicate (and specifically, to trade) that made the modern peace possible.
The
publishing process is too slow for Pinker to have included material on
the Arab Spring, but I think he would agree with me that the fanatic
Twitter-praisers are not so wrong. The impact of the Internet and social
media could be somewhat exaggerated in these particular cases; but the
general pressure that communication has on politics is so powerful that
it is hard to overestimate. Why was Vietnam such a hated war when Korea
was so praised? I do not think it is an exaggeration to answer with a
single word: Television. When you actually see, with
your own eyes, the burning villages and screaming children, you can no
longer convince yourself that war is glorious and honorable, that dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. It's not that the burning villages weren't there before—they were, and have been for all of human history—but no one saw them, and that has made all the difference.
After praising it so much, I would like to point out a few places where I think Better Angels could stand to be improved; even Homer nods.
First,
as mentioned in the title of this post, there is the rampant religious
imagery, “angels” and “devils” and the like. It's clear that Pinker
means these as metaphors, and as metaphors go they aren't bad; but still
it always grates me when secular thinkers try to co-opt religious
imagery instead of clearly expressing the awesome natural phenomena
themselves. No, there are not angels and devils on our shoulders, but
something far more wondrous (and terrifying): Pieces of our minds
themselves—literally, pieces of our minds, as in measurable
chunks of brain-stuff that can be pointed out on a diagram—work at
cross-purposes, constantly engaged in conflict, a tug-of-war between the
selfish and altruistic sides of human nature. As Pinker himself so
carefully points out, most violence is not conducted by mad
psychopaths bent on random destruction; it is conducted by ordinary
people with ordinary minds, caught up in ideology or trapped by
circumstance, ordinary people who find ways to persuade themselves that
what they are doing is right. Most of the truly horrible injustices have
been committed in the name of justice itself.
Second, there is
Pinker's libertarianism, which occasionally creeps into his analysis and
distorts it somewhat. Pinker's own brand of libertarianism is
relatively moderate and reasonable (he's certainly no Ron Paul, though a
fair comparison could be made to Penn Jillette), but still it seems to
lead him to strange arguments, as when he blames the failure of Medieval
commerce on the Christian taboo against usury and the consequent
overregulation of banking—instead of the far more obvious reasons, like
the lack of sanitation, transportation, communication, health care, and
large-scale governance. Frankly, I think we could do with a bit more taboo
on usury these days (not that I'm suggesting we should burn
moneylenders at the stake); the mortgage-backed derivatives crisis was
clearly not caused by an excess of oversight, nor is there any compelling economic reason that Visa needs to charge a 24% APR. (There are behavioral economic reasons why they can get away with it, but that's something else entirely.)
This also creeps in when he describes modern conservatives as “more liberal than past liberals”; this is certainly true in social issues—Gingrich
is hounded for making vaguely-racist remarks that would have seemed
like radical liberalism even 50 years ago, and Santorum appears to be
just now figuring out that he can no longer get away with saying gay
people should go to prison (which actually used to be something that was
done, as recently as Alan Turing). But on economic issues, the
opposite is the case, at least for the last half-century or so; Obama's
economic policy is more conservative than Reagan's, and the economics
that Ron Paul would implement has not been tried in a wealthy nation
since the 19th century. For a libertarian, this may look like
progress on both accounts; but for a liberal like myself, it feels more
like we've advanced on one front only to be routed at another. In the
long run, this trend will probably correct itself; but in the short run a
lot of people may suffer before it does.
These errors are minor, however; overall Better Angels is
a must-read. It will reshape everything you thought you knew about
history, war, and violence—and it will give you much-needed hope for
making the world a better place.